The night before last, I was reluctant to pack. It’s only been a couple weeks since my trip to New Orleans, and I still haven’t recovered from it in some ways. But I did. I packed clothes into the same suitcase as my merch, and went to bed. The next day I dragged myself down to Union Station and got on the train, with a little help hauling my heavy bag up into the train from a woman carrying a Stormtrooper helmet.

I got there and set up, slouched around a bit, then hooked up with Amara and Matt for conversation and BEER. I fell into bed around one, and woke up early Saturday morning with a slight hangover. Not a huge one; it was easily dispelled by a couple glasses of water.

On the way to the convention center, I did some math in my head. I realized that there is absolutely no way I could make a profit this con, even if I sold every single bit of merch I’d brought. I’d missed out on the $80/night block of hotel rooms reserved for dealers, and ended up getting a nice room in the Doubletree with a single king bed and a balcony. It was basically either that or a crapshoot on something cheap on Hotwire, and I didn’t want to be miserable at my first time at a con. So I kinda splurged, and decided to halfway consider this a vacation.

Knowing that my table performance could not have ANYTHING to do with how the weekend went was really freeing. I was able to avoid that high stress zone when OMG NOBODY’S BUYING STUFF I’M DOOMED on the beginning of the first day, and just casually engage people who slowed to a stop because my art caught their eye. My first sale came pretty early in the day, to a woman dressed up as Gwendolyn from Saga. Later on Lee Moyer passed by and we caught up on what’s been up in our respective lives since we met at Foolscap a couple of years. And later still Mike Dringenberg came by and grabbed a Rita, gushing about how gorgeous my art is. I don’t think I’ve ever had two wikinotable people come talk to me in one day before.

I realized that I’d sold close to half of the Ritas I’d brought. Only a couple Tarot decks, but there were several people who oohed and aahed over it, who I’m pretty sure will be back at my table tomorrow, or visiting my site after their next paycheck.

I got the next page of Rita something like 98% done during the lulls, really all I need to do is shape the panel transition from the previous page, and copy the edge of some stuff from the new page to the previous page.

Mike had wandered by again near the end of dealer’s room hours, and we were talking about our respective escapades in burning out on animation. On a whim I invited him out to dinner. We went to Sizzle Pie and shouted at each other over the music for a bit.

That…. you know, that’s a pretty damn good first day for a con I was kinda cursing Past Peggy for signing up for, two days ago. I need to figure out how to just Not Care if I make a profit more often without the drastic measure of paying more than I could possibly make at the con for a hotel room.

I have absolutely no expectations for tomorrow beyond it ending with karaoke with some of the Portland folks and Erin. And beer. Portland always seems to involve beer.

But right now I think I’m gonna close the computer and lie here naked in a dark room, with the balcony door wide open and the sounds of Portland drifting in.

After spending about three minutes talking to myself in a silly voice about how THE A BACONS, THEY CALL TO ME! THEY SAY UNTO ME: PEGGY! EAT OF WE A BACONS THAT WE MAY BECOME YOU! while preparing some breakfast, I have come to a conclusion. I think it is very important that I share this conclusion with you, the Internet.

I am a very silly person.

edit: Breakfast eaten. I AM BECOME A BACONS.

Last night, my ex-with-benefits came over. We went out to dinner at the little Italian restaurant around the corner. When we went back to my place, we watched some exceedingly stylized porn – it was nothing but long, lingering shots of a woman in various latex outfits, pretending to be distressed at the various situations she was tied up in. No other person. No narrative. No dialogue. No music. Just her little moans and the various sounds of her predicament. I started reacting to it as an art film, not as something designed to turn me on; I envisioned an installation piece, a 24-hour loop of nothing but various scenes like this.

Eventually we did the kinds of things that tend to happen when one is curled up on a big comfy beanbag chair with their ex-with-benefits, and went to bed.

I feel incredibly urbane and adult when things like this happen. Especially when they’re intertwined with incredibly mundane things like pouring baking soda and vinegar down the sink to try and tame That Foul Scent That Occasionally Visits The Kitchen.

Hmm. It felt like summer would never end – and then, all of a sudden, it’s done. I went to New Orleans with predictions of Seattle temperatures in the low nineties; I came back and drizzle and grey have begun. Today I put the summer hats in the closet, and I think it may be time to pull the False God out of its resting place in the studio closet soon.

Oddly enough, despite it being less sunny, I’m waking up bouncy and energetic around 9AM. It might be jetlag, I dunno. I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

On today’s task list: shower, draw page 112 of Rita (and hopefully get it up before midnight), spend a couple hours being tattooed, work on header images for the kickstarter, get petted by Nick.

So this pretty cool compilation of short animation popped up on Metafilter. It’s a side project of a bunch of pros and students, based around the theme of “ghost stories”. Lots of pretty work in a bunch of different styles.

Late Night Work Club presents GHOST STORIES from Late Night Work Club on Vimeo.

It kinda made me want to animate a short. I tried to resist this urge, but about halfway through, it was too much. Animator brain had woken up and was digging around in the ideas sitting around to see if anything could be done in a scale that makes it a semi-sane project.

Then animator brain found an idea I’d filed away explicitly for a short film: appropriate the dense, beat-driven obliqueness of this trailer for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”.

I really love the way it leaves you with an impression of a story. I’ve never seen the film, and may never, but I love this trailer. The slow drive up to the mansion threads through the whole thing, holding it together and being obviously very important. You stop blinking, focused on this rapid montage of images; the music creates a mood and helps stitch everything into one piece.

I wanted to see if this trick worked with a very, very different soundtrack. So I ripped the video, threw it into Premiere, and mashed it up with the first thing iTunes played that had a very very constant beat.

Yeah, this works. There’s a really awkward bit 2/3 of the way through where I chopped a big chunk of the source track out and really didn’t bother trying to hide the seams; it wasn’t worth it for a quick experiment like this.

Now to decide if I want to come up with a feature-length story, throw 95% of it away, and do about 100 separate scenes with pretty much no re-use possible between them. Or less if I keep it shorter. Which might mean the slow build of one continuous shot through the whole thing loses its power, I dunno. I’ll find out if I ever get to the point of making boards, I guess.

edit. Next step in this feasibility study: grab an animated feature, edit it like this, see if it actually works. The eye takes a little longer to make sense of a moving drawing than of a moving photo, as a rule, and it may not be possible to cut this rapidly and keep things legible. I’m torrenting ‘Treasure Planet’ as a test subject, and will have it handy the next time I feel like playing with this idea…

– showered, which did indeed serve to help remove the dried phlegm that coated my entire sinus cavities after yesterday (there’s still some left though)
– ordered some sexy leggings
– mailed off some things that needed mailing
– browsed Artist & Craftsman Supply’s book selection, looking for things to send to Lucy, and found it wanting – I’ll have to go downtown and visit Blick and Utrecht at some point, I guess.
– pooped for the first time since leaving for my trip, why I didn’t do this at my mom’s place I don’t know, my body is weird sometimes.
– did some roughs for the flier for [CENSORED]
– forgot to eat anything, oh dear, I think I’d better remedy that like now.
– did not get petted (current dragon petting condition: DEFCON 4, slightly worrisome but doom is far from imminent)

Anyone got how-to-draw book suggestions for a beginner artist who likes monsters?

WOOHOO. I just stepped on the scale for the first time in a week, and it turns out that I weigh less than I did when I left for New Orleans. Yes, that’s right. I went on a visit to New Orleans, a place famed for its food and its huge portions, a place I can navigate to in the airport by looking for the gate full of fat people, and managed to lose weight.

FLAWLESS VICTORY.

Also I am really glad to be back in Seattle, where I’m not the only person with unnatural hair color for miles around. I like the attention and smiles but I got a little tired of the amount of comment it raised down home. I’m almost tempted to dye it black for a week, just to vanish into utter anonymity for a while. I probably won’t though.

(There was one moment on the way back when I caught my reflection passing through the terminal. I was dressed in a simple black dress, with a black blouse over it hiding the tattoo. With my computer bag slung over my shoulder, I looked like any anonymous businesswoman. I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror at all. It was kinda nice, after a week of being Local Color. Can I still be Local Color when I haven’t lived there for half my life?)

Me, discussing dinner plans with my mom: “I think I want a decent steak tonight.”

Mom: “Here's the latest version of the paper's restaurant guide, see what looks good.”

Me: *blinks dumbly at the paper* *picks up ipad* *googles “steak new orleans”

I handed it over; she scrolled down saying “not that one” to several – mostly due to location – and suggested one she thinks is good. I eyeballed the distribution of its reviews on Yelp and agreed. Interestingly, she thinks that Yelp is utterly useless because everything she's looked at there has equal amounts of glowing and terrible reviews, so everything comes out average. Which is counter to my experience, where there's usually a clear trend to the ratings. Unless there's only like five of them. (I am aware of OTHER problems with Yelp, namely the repeated issues with them de-emphasizing good reviews for places in an effort to get money. But usually I can get a decent read on a place from skimming the range of reviews.)

I did not suggest that perhaps she's just checked online reviews for kinda mediocre places, or even crappy places that have a few fake 5-star reviews from shills and some 1-stars from actual customers…